Tech IndustryOct 7, 2019
BloombergGOOGLE<GO>

Which tech companies have stack ranking?

Stack ranking means that managers rank employees and teams relative to each other in performance. That means for anyone to go up a rung in the performance ranking, their peer has to go down a rung (or several rungs). Thus, backstabbing is incentivized, collaboration is disincentivized, and the company wastes lots of time and money on devs and teams blocking each other's work in the name of making their work look better, relative to their competition. Aside from Amazon and Bloomberg, which companies use stack ranking in evaluating SWE performance?

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Oracle dinosaur 🦖 Oct 7, 2019

All of them

Amazon HuhBro Oct 7, 2019

What??

Salesforce techlatkes Oct 7, 2019

Salesforce for promos

Citadel Securities dhj65hg54_ Oct 7, 2019

Some teams in Google will use it informally to help with calibration. The stacks are discarded after.

Cisco Satya4 Oct 7, 2019

Cisco does stack ranking always. Each team has ways to record the ranking decision in different ways . Nothing officially

Cisco MetricsMan Oct 7, 2019

lol I actually am the engineer that build this tool.

Cisco shdifigbrk Oct 7, 2019

What’s factored in then?

Splunk TheBackend Oct 7, 2019

Splunk for the win. 😞

Facebook Gkurhhd Oct 7, 2019

Every single company has stack ranking at company level (bonus pool is fixed). The only difference is how far down the hierarchy it’s pushed, how it is enforced and how public company is about it. If you do not enforce rating curve/stack ranking, you end up like universities with grade inflation where 50% gets A and transcript/gpa is meaningless.

Amazon bobcаt Oct 7, 2019

It’s Ok to have grade inflation if the school is extremely hard to get into (Stanford, MIT, CMU). If you’re like Amazon (state school) where everybody with a pulse gets admitted, then you need stack ranking to be brutal.

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Facebook Gkurhhd Oct 7, 2019

Wait. How does it work?

Cruise Automation WJBA12 Oct 7, 2019

Your performance is determined by a 360 feedback filled by your peers. Managers who should be the actual ones who make the decisions are clueless. They have no idea what is happening and hence they use this feedback at face value. So the people who fill the feedback on you and determine your performance are the same ones who compete with you in the rat race.

Walmart QTFP86 Oct 7, 2019

Wrong question as almost all of companies does it. Ask which companies don’t do it?

Splunk TheBackend Oct 7, 2019

The real question is: if I don’t viciously undercut my peers, will I face a loss of income at annual review time?

Google blueskyabc Oct 8, 2019

Tell us exactly how Bloomberg conducts stack ranking. Use examples